Leading Cause of Wrongful Convictions: Mistaken Identification by Eyewitnesses
By: Houston Criminal Attorney John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair
There have been 251 innocent people exonerated in this country by DNA evidence over the last two decades. The most disturbing aspect of this phenomenon of “convicting the innocent” is that more than 75 percent of those convictions involved mistaken identifications (according to the New York-based Innocence Project)—one or more witnesses pointing a finger of guilt at the wrong person. What is even more disturbing is that at least one-third of these mistaken identification cases involved two or more witnesses.
The lesson in these shocking figures is that what people see, or believe they saw, is not always reliable. This is especially true when the witness identification procedure is corrupted by rogue cops deliberately trying to frame innocent individuals. That’s what happened to Donald Wayne Good who, on June 18, 1983, was arrested, charged, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment in Irving, Texas for an aggravated rape, aggravated robbery, and burglary of a habitation for which he did not commit.
Beyond a doubt someone did break into the home of “Jane Doe,” bound her and her eight-year-old daughter, and forced Doe into a bedroom in the home where he raped the mother. The local Irving Police Department arrived after and processed the crime scene. The rape victim was taken to a local hospital where a “rape kit” examination was performed. After this examination was conducted, the victim met with investigators at which time she described her attacker as a white male in his mid-20s, six feet tall, weighing 190 pounds, clean shaven, with a dark tanned medium or large build, and blondish-brown hair. Based on this description, a police sketched artist prepared a “composite sketch” which was distributed throughout the Irving Police Department.
This is where Irving police detective Fred Curtis came into the picture. One of the detectives assigned to the Doe rape investigation, Curtis had been investigating a number of other “unsolved daytime burglaries” in the area. Curtis believed Good, who had been arrested three days (and subsequently released) before the Doe rape for bond forfeiture of a previous DWI arrest, was involved in the daytime burglaries. The detective called Good into his office to interview him about the string of burglaries. The interrogation didn’t go well for Curtis because Good refused to cooperate with the investigation. At this point in the interrogation the detective snatched up the composite sketch of the Doe rapist he had just received and told Good he looked “somewhat similar” to the rapist. And the detective then threatened Good by telling the suspect that he could “fix it” to make sure Good looked just like the Doe rapist if he didn’t cooperate. Good still refused to cooperate.
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